I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the relation between nature and grace – a relation which is of fundamental significance for the whole structure of dogmatic theology. And Neil MacDonald’s book, Metaphysics and the God of Israel, is a remarkably creative and provocative attempt to rethink this relation – indeed, to rethink metaphysics as a whole – from the standpoint of divine self-determination.

MacDonald’s central thesis is simple enough: the mode of all divine action is self-determination. God acts by determining himself to be the one who acts. In other words, God acts by directing his own identity, by acting on his own being. According to MacDonald, all divine action can be understood along these lines. God is creator, for example, simply because he determines himself to be the world’s creator. This determination is strictly something God does to himself.

The book’s most insightful – and most challenging – thesis arises at this point: if God had not determined himself to be this world’s creator, the world would nevertheless be exactly the same, except that it would not be identified as God’s creature. “We are not saying this world … would be a different world in terms of its natural properties, were it not created by God,” MacDonald insists; indeed, “there could well have been … a world identical to the one we inhabit that was not created by God” (p. 34).

If we ask, then, how the predicate “created by God” can be true of the world “without it being the case that anything is said or implied about the natural or material properties of the world,” MacDonald replies that the predicate “created by God” simply describes something God does to himself. It “does not imply anything at all” about the nature of the world (p. 35).

This line of argument is, of course, an extremely radical reassertion of Barth’s critique of natural theology. Here, there is no inherent connection between creator and creature, nature and grace. The only point of contact lies in God’s own self-determining act – an act which is itself the wholly contingent, wholly unnecessary relation between God and world.

This understanding of creation, MacDonald notes, “minimizes the importance of any … interaction between theology and science,” since “one could have two identical worlds one of which it would be true to say that God determined himself to be the creator of it and the other not” (p. 40). In a nutshell, what this means is: no natural theology!

MacDonald also argues that his concept of self-determination can lay the basis for a new “biblical metaphysics” which can account for the way God acts in relation to the world. Just as God becomes the world’s creator through an act of self-determination, so God “gets himself into the world” by determining himself to be in a personal space-time relationship with his creature (p. 67). Against the classical conception of God as acting providentially in history “from eternity,” MacDonald insists that God has a place in the world, and that God acts from within the world’s history. God determines himself to be part of his creation, to remain in our time after the act of creation (this, MacDonald says, is the meaning of the seventh day of creation in Gen. 2:2-3). God therefore “has time,” he “has a history.” In contrast to a classical metaphysical construction in which God eternally determines what will happen in time, MacDonald thus argues that God simply “determines himself to be within our time,” so that God “comes along with us” in personal relationship (p. 79).

Further, God determines himself to be infinitely temporal and infinitely spatial, so that he has a time and place within the world which is nevertheless “peculiar and exclusive to him … as one of the divine perfections” (p. 86). And if we want to understand the nature of this peculiar divine (ad intra!) space, we must point to the resurrection: “to say Jesus has been raised is to say that he is in God’s space, the space peculiar and exclusive to God” (p. 89). On this basis, MacDonald also sketches a christological reformulation, according to which “human history [is] ... present to God ad intra,” so that (following Richard Bauckham) the human identity of Jesus is the divine identity (p. 239).

This whole book bristles with vigorous insights, surprising possibilities, and explosive ideas (for just one remarkable example, see the penetrating interpretation of das Nichtige, in a footnote on p. 217) – and each stage of the argument is developed through skirmishes into Old Testament exegesis, historical theology, modern philosophy, and Barthian dogmatics. In the end, however, I must admit I found the book a little disappointing and a little unconvincing. The problem, I think, is that MacDonald’s concept of self-determination remains too narrowly formalistic and analytical, so that one is left with the feeling that this concept just doesn’t do very much after all.

MacDonald has a lot to say about logic and rationality, and he suggests that the “litmus test” for his thesis is whether it is “logically consistent” (p. 133). But logical consistency is hardly an adequate litmus test for a theological proposal of this scope. When the problem of God’s spatiality is raised, for example – in what sense can God said to be spatial if his location cannot be defined by geometrical description? – MacDonald merely assures us: “it is enough that ‘God determines himself to be in a place in this world’ … is a logically consistent claim” (p. 117). But this is clearly not enough – not by half – since there’s all the difference in the world between the (minimal) formal requirement of logical consistency and the material requirement of a convincing explanation. Concepts in dogmatic theology ought to have real explanatory power; even if they can’t clear up every problem, they should certainly “prove themselves” by reaching explanatorily beyond the safe circle of tautology (after all, any tautology is logically invincible – but that doesn’t mean it explains very much!).

It seems to me that MacDonald could thus refine his proposal, not by altering its fundamental thesis – that the mode of divine action is self-determination – but by allowing the formal questions of “rationality” and “logical consistency” to recede into the background, and by concentrating explicitly on the development of a more expansive, more differentiated, and more discursive account of self-determination. Of course, Karl Barth’s doctrine of election is itself precisely such an attempt to develop an expansive christological conception of divine being as self-determining being – and Barth’s own ontological construction (cf. also the interpretive work of Robert Jenson and Bruce McCormack) clearly indicates that the concept of self-determination need not be reduced to tautology, but can exercise extraordinary explanatory power which makes itself felt in every corner of the dogmatic loci.

I voice these criticisms, then, as a friend and ally of MacDonald’s proposal. I think a new ontological vision of divine action as divine self-determination is precisely the way forwards for contemporary dogmatics; and I believe one of the resources for this ontological thinking is a radical recovery of Barth’s critique of natural theology (as a corollary of Barth’s christological actualism). So I think MacDonald’s proposal is of tremendous value, even if the concept of self-determination needs to be developed in a much more refined and more expansive way than it is here.

One final note: in my opinion, MacDonald’s radical critique of natural theology – “the world would be the same even if God didn’t create it!” – is a stunning intervention in contemporary theology (where, in most quarters, “creation” has become an axiom which wholly determines the structure of christology, reconciliation, eschatology, etc). Nevertheless, I don’t think I agree with MacDonald’s suggestion that this stance eliminates the significance of dialogue with the natural sciences.

On the contrary, dialogue with science may play a crucial role in interpreting the “site” or “situation” (to borrow Badiou’s terminology) in which the event of God’s self-determining action takes place. If God interrupts the natural order in a new event of self-relation to the world (thus constituting the world as “creature”), then it is of great significance to understand what kind of world this is which God interrupts and reconfigures. For example: the core event on which theology reflects is the resurrection of Jesus; and although this event is unthinkable for natural science, the site of this event (i.e. a dead human body) is an object of scientific knowledge, and it is precisely this site which the resurrection interrupts and reconfigures (i.e. without this corpse, there could be no resurrection).

In other words, although there is no direct trajectory from scientific knowledge to a knowledge of divine action, science may nevertheless help us to understand the situation in which the divine action takes place, and the kind of reconfiguring which this action produces. And if this is the case, might it also be possible that a profoundly atheistic interpretation of the natural world is in fact more useful for theological reflection than any explicitly religious reading of nature?

30 Comments:

Kevin
said...

You do us all a valuable service by providing these reviews. Thanks.

One comment: it wasn't clear to me who was claiming that MacDonald's proposal represents a radicalization of Barth's rejection of natural theology--you, MacDonald, or both--but it seems to me that Barth's own radicalization of this rejection leads him in precisely the opposite direction. The story goes something like this: (a) Barth's rejection of natural theology leads him to focus on revelation; (b) his focus on revelation leads him to Christocentrism; (c) his Christocentrism leads him to a groundbreaking doctrine of election; and (d) his doctrine of election leads him to understand creation as "fit" for God's covenant activity. This counts as a "radicalization" because it leaves nothing that could serve as an "independent" starting point for theology, since we can now see how all such points have now been taken up (sublated) by a particular point, namely, God's determination to be God-with-us. This strikes me as far more radical than MacDonald's proposal (as you've sketched it).

MacDonald chooses to "minimize the importance of any interaction between religion and science" by taking the creative role out of God's nature. A much simpler alternative, in my opinion, to the problem of a scientifically coherent theology was offered by process theology years ago, which retains the creative role in God's nature, but takes away the omnipotence, such that God becomes the creative lure who offers novelty to the universe. Under process theology, a world without God would not be identical to one with God, because God is the one who offers creative novelty to the world.

By taking creativity out of the divine equation, God becomes so removed from the everyday that he/she becomes maybe a sympathetic companion, but little else. The idea that God adopts the world as his creation without actually creating it seems a little bizarre to me. I can see the value of a God who acts as a companion along with us on the journey--something that is also highly important to process theology or other varieties of panentheism--I think that MacDonald's theology, as you have described it, creates a significant disconnect between God and the world. If his primary concern is the reconciliation between science and theology, I think there are other solutions to the problem.

Ben, you are a master of the genre "book review". A scrupulous reading, a sharp critique, and constructive proposals. What more could a reader - or author - ask for? I read the book in May and will now revisit it with your comments in mind. Many thanks.

“We are not saying this world … would be a different world in terms of its natural properties, were it not created by God,” MacDonald insists; indeed, “there could well have been … a world identical to the one we inhabit that was not created by God” (p. 34).

I find this possibility troubling, although you are right, I think Ben, to say that it is an outcome of a certain strand of thinking in Barth. I would have said that it is the denial of the analogy of being more precisely rather than just the denial of natural theology in general, but that's just a quibble.

But I think MacDonald simply must be mistaken on this point. (I haven't read the book, but I assume that you are putting forward his view correctly). Suppose we have two nearly identical worlds, W and W*. W is a creature whose shape and indeed very existence depends upon God's active, providential command. W* is like W in every relevant respect except for the fact that it does not depend upon God for its existence. W* is self-subsistent, whereas W exists 'in God' in a certain respect.

Now the problem for a theologian is: how could you ever show that our world is W, rather than W*? Obviously there is no criterion you could appeal expect pure, blind faith. Has MacDonald pulled a Descartes and posed a radically skeptical problem his solution does not adequately address?

Perhaps. If (1) MacDonald is right that there might exist a world such that it is indistinguishable from a creature without being a creature, then (2) he has opened such a Pandora's box. But, regardless of what his stated motivations are for making this move, it seems to me simply to yield too much ground to the scientists. I cannot think of any plausible reason to hold (1) except a fear that someday the physicists will finally figure everything out, and so he wants to immunize faith from scientific criticism by opening an infinite epistemic gap between science and faith.

Of course, putting things this way has already conceded defeat to the Richard Dawkins-es of the world. If MacDonald's picture is right, Christianity is simply a useless extraneous hypothesis; epicycles upon epicycles. If everything that needs explaining is explainable without God, then God goes to live in the history of pseudoconcepts like phlogiston and aether.

On the contrary, I say let us reject (1) at least for as long as the scientists still don't have a good explanation of the phenomena of, e.g. religious experience, moral decision making, the freedom of the will, etc. Until they actually explain such things, they are just waving their hands and writing blank checks on hypothetical demonstrations.

I share concerns that are similar to Shane's. According to MacDonald you can have two identical worlds, one with a Creator and one without a Creator. In the former God is self-determining to be the Creator. But is he doing any real creating or is God just applying a label to himself ("I am the Creator"). If God is actually creating then I think it legitimate to explore the Creator/Creation connection (natural theology). But if there is no real creation, just a self-determined “declaration”, then in what sense is God the Creator?

In short, if God created the world it seems legitimate to explore the connection between a Creator and His Handiwork. Barth and MacDonald might not like the fruits of that exploration, but it is a legitimate inquiry. How could it not be legitimate? But if God didn't create the world and is simply co-opting the “Creator” label by fiat, this empties the term of any creedal significance.

Richard, you ask: "But is he doing any real creating or is God just applying a label to himself ('I am the Creator')?" This is definitely an important problem — but just to clarify, MacDonald's whole idea is that "creating" simply is God's "applying a label to himself". So MacDonald could answer: yes, God is really creating!

Incidentally, he still thinks that God really brings the world into being through this act of self-labelling — but he wants to insist that there's nothing in the world itself which could ever tell you that God created it.

Thanks for the review. I think you are spot on regarding your critique of the primary criterion of "logical consistancy." As Emerson aptly noted, "Logical consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds." Furthermore, I think this problem is seen in contemporary analytic disucussions of the problem of evil in the distinction between theodicy and defence wherein a defense is not positing a true but a possible scheme to explain the existence of evil.

"There is nothing in the world itself which could ever tell you that God created it."

How about the Exodus? Is this not how Israel came to its conclusion that God created the world? I think it is wrong to define creation simply as the physical matter and givenness of what we see and experience apart from God.

Following Barth (as Kevin pointed out) I would want to talk about creation as that which is specifically fitted for the covenant. You cannot separate creation from covenant.

Jenson does the same thing when he defines creation as that act whereby God creates and moves along a history. Creation is creation because God is involved in it. Our world would be completely different if God had decided not to make it the realm of his covenant.

Let E be the epistemological claim that we cannot know that the world is created.

Let O be the ontological claim that there can exist a world identical to this one, except that it is not created by God.

The two claims are related but they clearly aren't the same. The truth of E and the truth of O are logically independent. E does not logically entail O, nor does O logically entail E. (There might be a metaphysical argument to be made, but I don't see any logical connections between them).

So which claim is MacDonald advancing, E or O? Your post made it sound like he was advancing O, but that strikes me as a pretty bold claim.

If all he's advancing is E, then his claim seems a bit more in line with the traditional rejection of natural theology. E seems like a much weaker, and therefore more plausible, claim.

Shane, thanks for that clarification: yes, MacDonald is definitely advancing both E and O. (As a side point, he cites the opening section of Barth's CD III/1 in support of O, but Barth is clearly only talking about E. That's why I think MacDonald is radicalising Barth's position.)

The discomfort among the comment-leavers thus far with the notion of a Creator-less creation, is a discomfort worth heeding to my mind.

Can the blunt fact (at least pro nobis) that we are around to formulate the question help us to decifer whether we inhabit W or W* (to continue using Shane's terms). The reference to Descartes above might be helpful, insofar as our own presence pondering here points us in the direction of thinking that this world is indeed the created one. Perhaps its a limitation in my logic, and one that science can eventually cure me of (!), but it's difficult to imagine the existence of finitude without beginning.

What could a world (W*) to which no Creator had ever said "I am the Creator" be like? What clue could we have that we were living in such a world? It would have to be some hint of our participation in un-created-ness. Now, something un-created either exists without bounds, or it doesn't exist. We can hardly presume that we don't exist---so our best option would be to imagine ourselves in a boundless universe, mere Being. It would be hard to avoid a few natural-theological extrapolations from that, most of which I imagine would tend toward something resembling Buddhist or Stoic detachment (or gnostic escape).

Creation-as-we-find-it is a theological reality, not one that comes with its own explanation, but one that must be reckoned with nonetheless. MacDonald seems to be trying to grease the scant foothold natural theology finds in the basic question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" Which is, as Shane argued, to cede too much territory to science's hypothetical discoveries---even as the evidence that science offers seems to point to a bounded (but open), rather than boundless universe.

The claim that 'there could well have been … a world identical to the one we inhabit that was not created by God' does minimize the damage that science could potentially do to Christianity. But at the same time, it minimizes the good that Christianity could potentially do for science. That doesn't mean it isn't true of course, but if one cares about science, it's a reason to pause.

Also, this claim seems either to imply that history could be exactly the same in the absence of God, or else that history is in some sense not of this world. I don't mean 'provable' history here (a concept about which I'm skeptical in any case). I mean rather the stories we affirm about the past. If we affirm the Christian story, can we in the same breath claim that history would have been identical in a world without God?

Doesn't the notion that the world could have been exactly like it is without God as the creator imply an essentially ahistorical cosmology? In other words, the Christian understanding of the "world" is that it is fundamentally a historical drama in which God is the actor. If God was not the creator of the world, it seems to me that the world would be entirely different. In the first place, if God were not the creator of the world, I cannot imagine that the world would be the place in which Jesus rose from the dead, which is an essential part of the Christian undestanding of the world-as-history.

MacDonald's earlier book "Karl Barth and the Strange New World within the Bible" seems to make some points which would clarify what MacDonald is up to here, I think. (Fair disclosure--I'm writing a review of it right now for the Princeton Barth Center). MacDonald is throughout arguing that Barth's theology allows one to recover a 'sui generis historicality' which is like ordinary history, except that you can't do history about it--apparently. MacDonald is arguing there that just like Kant makes a transcendental turn to create a sui generis realm (the synthetic a priori) which avoids the prongs of Hume's fork, just in the same way Barth offers something like a transcendental argument (!) which saves theology from Overbeck. Whereas Hume wanted to reduce philosophy to logic and natural science, Overbeck wanted to reduce theology to church history and apocalyptic.

I'm not too optimistic about the success of the Barthian position MacDonald stakes out there, but it does seem to be directly relevant to the matter at hand here: in response to Halden, MacDonald could say that God's interactions with the world aren't historical, but that they aren't ahistorical either. He'd probably say they were ahistorically historical or historically ahistorical (or both, perhaps alternating the italics from one word to another). Presumably he would mean by this that God's relation to the world is 'historical' in the sense in which theology has to do with a 'sui generis historicality' and not with the sense of history invoked by, say, the social sciences.

I don't really think that's a coherent reply, at least not without a lot of discussion about what exactly 'sui generis historicality' is supposed to be. But, of course, he might just point us back to the earlier book to find the account spelled out there.

From what has been said, one might get the impression that MacDonald is an armchair logician, obsessed with propositions and dismissive of history, wielding a scalpel on the body of systematic theology. Nothing could be further from the truth, as both the glowing blurbs from Robert Jenson and Brevard Childs on the book's back cover suggest, and two epigraphs from the book attest:

"Logic is doubtless unshakeable, but it cannot withstand a man who wants to go on living" (Kafka).

"Were the (biblical) narratives written or read as fiction, then God would turn from the lord of history into the creature of the imagination with disastrous effects ... Hence the Bible's determination to sanctify and compel literal belief in the past" (Meir Sternberg).

I am saying that although MacDonald certainly radically rejects not only the projects of natural theology but also all attempts to deduce divine action from historical events, he equally emphatically affirms that the world is in fact, though known only through faith, the theatre of God's glory and the stage on which God acts. Indeed MacDonald spends over half his book exploring the presence of God in the primeval and Deuteronomistic histories, and in expounding the gospel narratives in terms of the model of substitutionary atonement. Why? Precisely to delineate the ontological (and not just economic) identity of God.

In fact, given his deployment of Bauckham's thesis on the inclusion of Jesus in the divine identity, in the very Who of God, and, further, his excursus on Barth's exegesis of John 1 - "Logos is unmistakably substituted for Jesus" - issuing in his restatement of Nicaea, "There was not when he [Jesus of Nazareth] was not" (p. 240), so implicitly historical, not anti-historical, is MacDonald's thesis that we arguably have a case here against a logos asarkos and, by implication, if against his own overstatements, equally against a theos acosmos (a suggestion, to be sure, that needs careful qualification to safeguard the freedom of God and avoid a collapse into pantheism or panentheism - an argument, by the way, that must proceed precisely on the basis of the logos ensarkos). Of course Shane is right that this is a theological reconfiguration of the social scientific concept of history, but - for example - is there any way to talk about - as surely we must talk about - the resurrection as an historical event without insisting that this is history, but not as we know it, Spock?

Finally, back to the main thrust of the discussion, MacDonald's thought experiment about a parallel non-God-given universe is surely a foil deployed to secure the point, as Jüngel so powerfully and provocatively puts it, that "God is not necessary." After all, scientists and historians do, as a matter of fact, and must (I think) as a matter of methodology, work etsi Deus non daretur. And pace Ben's point about the resurrection of Jesus presupposing a corpse, well, yes, but I can't for the life of me see how science may "help us to understand ... the kind of reconfiguring which this [divine] action produces." Only poets can help us here.

Anyway, since everybody is beating up on MacDonald I thought I'd add a few more supportive thoughts to the mix.

There Ganymede is wrought with living art,Chasing thro' Ida's groves the trembling hart:Breathless he seems, yet eager to pursue;When from aloft descends, in open view,The bird of Jove, and, sousing on his prey,With crooked talons bears the boy away.In vain, with lifted hands and gazing eyes,His guards behold him soaring thro' the skies,And dogs pursue his flight with imitated cries.

Now that's good poetry! --Vergil, Aeneid Book V. The incident, by the way, is referring to Zeus rape of Ganymede. Plato in the Laws alleges that this myth was introduced by the Minoans to legitimate sodomy.

I wouldn't go so far as to banish the poets--but as I stated above, they are untrustworthy guides.

When you say that logical consistency isn't an adequate litmus test for theological claims of the relevant scope, do you mean that such theological claims needn't be logically consistent? Or do you mean merely that it isn't the *only* test such claims ought to meet (so that meeting the test of consistency doesn't make the proposal adequate)? Likewise, when you suggest that the requirements re: logic and rationality ought to "fade into the background", do you mean that it isn't important that theological proposals be logically consistent? Or are you merely suggesting that the theologian should have other (and perhaps higher) priorities? (e.g. One might make some proposals that *prima facie* seem logically consistent, but put the question of their consistency on hold in order to develop some further thought.)

Hi Patrick. No, I didn't mean to suggest that theology should be illogical. I just meant that "logical consistency" can't be a litmus test for theology, since the question of logical consistency is completely separate from the question of truth. (Just think of an argument like this one: All men are cabbages; Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates is a cabbage. It's logically perfect, but it's still a load of nonsense!)

So anyway, I think theologians should certainly be able to tell the difference between a good argument and a bad one; but I don't think we need to make a great fuss about it, or to treat logical precision as though it were a theological virtue in its own right. It's just a basic minimal requirement — a bit like using grammar, or wearing underpants: you need to know how to do it properly, but you don't need to draw attention to it.

Logical consistency is not a sufficient condition for truth--that much is right. Think of a good novel, which presents an coherent, but fictional world. But, logical consistency is a necessary condition for truth. No contradictions obtain and nobody is ever justified in believing one.

(This is why I wince when I hear theologians say that things are "directly indirect" or "impossibly possible" or "possibly impossible" or so forth. It's an abuse of language at best and pure nonsense at worst.)

OK Ben, thanks. I think the trouble is (or was) with what passing a 'litmus test' amounts to. That is, I wasn't sure whether, as you and MacDonald were imagining things, a proposal's passing a litmus test was necessary for truth, or whether it was by itself sufficient for truth. If you take MacDonald's claim in the first way, then he's clearly right -- his proposal needs to be consistent! But if you take it in the other way, then it's clearly wrong, since, as you point out, logical consistency is easy to come by. (In short, I agree with Shane.) Anyway, "litmus test" seems ambiguous